I recall the comp., sci., and soc.culture., from just before AOL opened the flood gates (access), and even soon thereafter, as they used to be so fun...
I feel like the HN hivemind likes to bash Reddit for some reason, but for me it has not been that bad. I've got small work gigs on there, discovered places where I've got to learn about stuff that I like, being updated about what's going on in the FOSS world, discover new music, etcetera.
Yes, some people in there would like to drag you into absurd and nonsensical arguments, but even in here where I do not participate that much have fell into that situation. I went into Reddit after 6 years of using Facebook which was much, much worse. Reddit made me ditch Facebook once and for all.
Not that I agree even in the slightiest about the changes they are about to make, but I'm yet to find an alternative where I could find all of the aforementioned but with a more sane support. I don't see how usenet can bring all of that all of a sudden, nor see myself using something like Mastodon and become a social media addict.
Some problems with Reddit (like it having a lowest-common-denominator general user base due to its size) are avoidable by going on smaller subreddits.
The real problem with Reddit is that even small subreddits tend towards beginner or introductory content because that reflects the level of understanding of most users.
Having separable, more focused forums can allow for discussions at a much higher level of knowledge and expertise than Reddit. You can see plenty of examples of this today with HN having better content and discussion in its niche than anywhere on Reddit, and plenty of complicated high-skill-ceiling discussion topics like vehicle maintenance or travel hacks still being discussed at high quality on oldschool forums.
I don’t see a benefit for Usenet because it wasn’t obsoleted by Reddit, it was made obsolete by forums. Honestly I just wish those would make a resurgence. They allow for so much more customization than Reddit, Usenet, or Facebook and don’t have centralized policies constantly messing with them. And I really don’t think there is a need for a one-stop-shop site or tech stack for focused discussion. Reddit and FB may have replaced forums in most cases for most people from 2010 to now, but as they’ve become more commercialized with more rules, maybe we can switch back
I use reddit almost daily for niche subjects, and I only use it in the browser. Granted, I use old.reddit, but still, I have no idea what people are on about when they say they need a 3rd party solution to use it. It's practically zero effort. To me, it takes more time to complain about it than to actually use it.
I find it slightly annoying how Reddit gets always singled out as being “better than other social media” when it’s often more toxic and addictive.
Most of my FB feed is photos of my friends/ life updates. Most of my Instagram feed is dogs. You can curate almost any social media into what you want, Reddit isn’t extraordinary in that respect.
But there’s a smugness to a lot of redditors I really despise that I think the voting system rewards. As if having the statistically most broadly agreeable opinions makes one superior. Even in small to medium sized communities.
USENET still exists, and some groups are still active, just not at their peak from yesteryear -- so why not go join and see if anything is happening in your old haunts.
I feel that the Usenet protocol in hand with today's technologies should be amazing. It should be possible to make a very powerful client that summarizes groups discussions say, by day/week; filters spam pretty aggressively and sorts or "mutes" known trolls or bad users.
The one thing I also wish would be better is discoverability... Just the other day I logged in into an irc server (LiberaChat?) but just didn't know where to go from there.. I got into my country's room, but it was very quiet.
It would be interesting to know from a USENETer perspective how it feels to see the hordes of Redditors flooding their platform in an Eternal September once again [1].
Could Usenet get “revived”, to replace the soon to be unusable Reddit?
Technically yes. Become widely adopted, maybe if...
There are free Usenet providers for the text groups. People would have to agree on methods to ignore the spam bots, maybe a signed message header/footer that a UI recognizes. There are forums and chat systems that already leverage Usenet as the transport/storage but they all need some tender loving care.
In my opinion for that to be widely adopted people would need a low friction way to access Usenet and it would need to provide them a UI/UX they are familiar with. Perhaps Usenet would be entirely transparent to them. Perhaps it would be a simple nginx web front-end so that anyone could run a node and it would use Usenet on the backend for storage and transport, ideally the sites that implemented NNTPS (TLS). Just nginx+python, or nginx+golang or an nginx module and super-lightweight with secure safe defaults. There would need to be a group set up where all the front-end nodes ingest group keys, identities, etc... and maybe a git repo that bootstraps all of this.
Traditional methods like using a Usenet reader such as Thunderbird? Probably not. Probably very small technical circles. I think this would be akin to convincing people to switch from Discord back to IRCD or using Mumble/Murmur for voice.
I want a client that looks basically how reddit looks today. An aggregator.
And maybe that aggregator has a back-end that runs on a VM somewhere that I control, or I can pay someone to run an aggregator for me, or whatever.
But I want each subreddit to be federated. Run on its own server, with its own moderators.
I want to be able to make as many Reddit accounts as I want to (dozens, maybe not hundreds), and pick which ones I use on which subreddits. Some decentralized authorization / authentication scheme? Or maybe some centralized server? Or using OAuth or something? I don't really care.
I want to SUBSCRIBE to a list of Admins. If an Admin shadowbans a user, I don't see their posts. I find this incredibly useful. Other people will disagree with me about which users, which actions, should result in shadowbanning.
I think that about wraps it up. What am I missing?
Way back in the day, Reddit was marketed as a way to create a forum without any technical setup, and then to view content across all the communities you were a “member” of in one place. You can still see glimpses of that, I think when you signup or register a subreddit it suggests making one for your dnd clan or something like that.
I don’t think Reddit realized how smart this strategy would end up becoming, because over time what happened is that existing Reddit users would just join the subreddit for some topic they were interested in (like a band) instead of seeking out forums for it on the web. Eventually enough people started doing that, that subreddits for a topic would absolutely dwarf any single traditional forum in activity. Because reddit is a single site they could also do a bunch of SEO optimizations due to having larger scale than independent forums. The result is a massive network effect and controllling the top-of-funnel for online discussions on the web.
Anyway, what fucked up Reddit was that after 2010 or so they started turning it into more of a consumption platform than a discussion platform, plus various issues with moderation (the emergence of powermods who are all secretly monetizing their subs to help advertisers, implementing platform-wide moderation policies), turning it more into a centralized service with less focus on discussion.
Honestly, combining the web with forums provides like 90% of what you want, it just doesn’t do aggregation, nor does it let you directly ban a mod (but you can always switch sites). But it does decentralize auth, moderation, servers, and allow more freedom in how a subreddit-equivalent gets run while also allowing moderators to directly monetize their sites rather than having to resort to secretive scheming. Maybe we simply need some kind of protocol or common API + FOSS client that lets you automatically grab and sort top posts from a list of forums that implement the protocol.
I don't see anyone talk about search discoverability. Many, many people add "site:reddit.com" when searching for product reviews and other information to weed out the garbage, and so far as I know, it currently isn't possible to search usenet with Google, Bing, etc.
I think it'd basically mean there was an easy way to access usenet text groups via the browser, and thus also an easy way for the average Joe to access usenet.
Some have already mentioned spam and moderation, and I think this will be a huge factor. Without the ability to moderate, bad actors quickly ruin any potentially-popular social media outlet. Most comments are happy about the lack of moderation so far, but that's actually a problem IMO.
When I first read this comment, my initial thought was that it would be neat if there were a forum-provider that made it easy for nontechnical users to create and run forums on their platform. That way if you wanted to do a site:forumprovider.com search you’d search across all forum instances. Then I realized that’s exactly how Reddit was originally designed and used!
Anyway, the forums of the aughts were discoverable through search and anecdotally used to be more highly ranked in search queries until they mysteriously started getting derailed by Google I think around 2016 or so. They solve the moderation and spam problem by have forum moderators just like Reddit - unlike Reddit these were usually real people from the forum + owners, and not powermods. Power mods I think do all kinds of shady stuff to monetize their control, with forums that’s less necessary as you can just put up banner ads, sponsored content, etc without running afoul to Reddit policies. And unlike with Reddit, there is no huge incumbency/landgrab advantage from controlling a common term like “politics” because you’re not running on a single site. I was surprised not to see it mentioned more here or on the current top Reddit post also discussing this, I guess most Reddit users are too young to have had exposure to them, but besides Digg it’s actually what Reddit replaced as it grew in the early 2010s.
I see this oft repeated...but why do we pretend companies and advertisers didn't figure this out long ago and start gaming the system? Because they absolutely do.
Anymore you have to verify each response, look into their history, etc. Which puts it back on par with Amazon reviews, really.
It doesn't combat spam very well. So I doubt it will come back at least in substantial way. Other thing is that you would need some agreed standard to make it "rich" as in user experience.
Seems more likely that "the fediverse" will take up the slack. Perhaps not Mastodon (the best known implementation) which is more of a Twitter alternative, but Lemmy seems to fit this niche pretty well. OTOH, a revival/update of Usenet would not be unwelcome either. NNTP > ActivityPub, after all.
The pricing model is hot garbage, but most Reddit users will continue to use it (myself included). That said, I'd be happy to move to an alternative, even usenet. Reddit has so much weird baggage associated with it (powermods, admin shenanigans, a surprisingly high number of racists/sexists) that I'd love to find a place for more nuanced and interesting discussions.
> I'd be happy to move to an alternative, even usenet
Well, reddit is free (for the individual user) - Usenet is not. ISP's don't even offer news accounts any more and even when they did, they were so useless you had to pay for an NNTP account anyway.
why do you use reddit? I'm not being argumentative, I'm just wondering.
I stopped because I found that looking at reddit would negatively alter my perceptions of reality. Hacker news doesn't seem to do that. I also found that conversations on reddit were not very engaging but rather formulaic. It wasn't about having a discussion, just towing a party line (whatever the party for the particular subreddit might be).
Just do what slack did with irc. “Reinvent” it with a modern interface and some fixes. The mercurial masses will flock to the hot new platform, VC will shower you with adoration and cash, we’ll tell stories about how you don’t eat breakfast and only ever wear one sock. Everyone will emulate you and then you can come back around as a wealthy guru investor.
In particular, third party apps like Apollo are popular for moderators because the default tools from Reddit are just hard to use, especially on mobile. Thus, I think the big impact to reddit's model is to actually drive off a lot of moderators.
Personally, this is what bothers me the most; subreddits that are strictly moderated are usually useful, and ones that aren't are just not worth regular time.
This is also why I'm not really sure about usenet or any other replacement, because moderation is still the hard problem to get right.
I think this is out of the complaints about API access costs and those using third-party clients will "just stop using reddit" which I'm not sure is actually going to happen as broadly as folks may believe
The official clients suck, but that's not currently a problem because there are quality third party clients you can use instead. But this change is going to shut down the third party clients.
If they also stop offering old.reddit.com I'm convinced the place will be a ghost town like Tumblr in a matter of weeks.
The new Web experience is horrid. Intentionally bad it looks. Maybe it works if you just read the posts and maybe few comments, but trying to go any deeper in conversations is just not possible.
Usenet won't be as effective, since it lacks "karma." People love up and down voting, and usenet simply does not provide that.
That, and the the whole question of who's going to pay for a large amount of usenet traffic. Think of all those images traveling uuencoded and being stored at every hub...
> Think of all those images traveling uuencoded and being stored at every hub.
Yes, the text-only bias of Usenet (really NNTP) is a bit of a problem, but otherwise it's a pretty good starting point. Better IMO than ActivityPub, which is insane wrt consistency - e.g. everyone viewing a post from different servers is likely to see a different set of responses - and is actively cache-hostile. Fix the text bias, or add a side protocol for images like IRC did, and it would be pretty close to what you'd want for a decentralized Reddit (or HN) replacement.
Are there any alternative (open source) implementations of the _server_ side of the Reddit API? Then you could just point Teddit, Aurora, etc. at the alternative server. The only required work would be implementing the database backend which seems... feasible.
Pricing out of third party clients via API fees > only official website and clients are available > they get worse with monetization attempts > smart people who don't want to put up with less-useful UIs leave > site becomes devoid of "good" content.
Third party clients are going to be cut off. IMO the case is overblown: Reddit has their own mobile apps which are... fine. Definitely not amazing but they serve the uses of the vast majority of Reddit users.
The idea that a serious number of users would rather move to Usenet than use Reddit's official offerings feels like very optimistic thinking to me.
The best sub reddits are heavily modded, but Usenets support for moderation is very small, which means it will only be great if you can preselect by limiting who gets access to the groups.
I remember alt.religion.emacs - quite vividly, in fact.
NNTP was a massive quasi-distributed forum (I wasn’t the newsmaster at the ISPs I worked at, but frequently dealt with the servers and setups) and a pretty big overhead resource and management-wise, but pretty interesting to deal with until it was overwhelmed by binaries groups and all sorts of weirdness.
I do miss the quirky sense of humor and the community - somewhat like Mastodon, for those who are leaving Twitter - but I don’t miss the drama, the flooding and the flame wars.
Anyone in here claiming to use "old.reddit.com" -- so you're a non-logged-in lurker? and have a weird sense of entitlement for how the site should serve you? The old UI is great yes. But if you can't be bothered to log in as a normal user of the site (and set your preferences to the old UI) your opinion loses alot of steam.
Log in -> set preferences -> surf reddits with www. urls like normal.
[+] [-] Gualdrapo|2 years ago|reply
Yes, some people in there would like to drag you into absurd and nonsensical arguments, but even in here where I do not participate that much have fell into that situation. I went into Reddit after 6 years of using Facebook which was much, much worse. Reddit made me ditch Facebook once and for all.
Not that I agree even in the slightiest about the changes they are about to make, but I'm yet to find an alternative where I could find all of the aforementioned but with a more sane support. I don't see how usenet can bring all of that all of a sudden, nor see myself using something like Mastodon and become a social media addict.
[+] [-] opportune|2 years ago|reply
The real problem with Reddit is that even small subreddits tend towards beginner or introductory content because that reflects the level of understanding of most users.
Having separable, more focused forums can allow for discussions at a much higher level of knowledge and expertise than Reddit. You can see plenty of examples of this today with HN having better content and discussion in its niche than anywhere on Reddit, and plenty of complicated high-skill-ceiling discussion topics like vehicle maintenance or travel hacks still being discussed at high quality on oldschool forums.
I don’t see a benefit for Usenet because it wasn’t obsoleted by Reddit, it was made obsolete by forums. Honestly I just wish those would make a resurgence. They allow for so much more customization than Reddit, Usenet, or Facebook and don’t have centralized policies constantly messing with them. And I really don’t think there is a need for a one-stop-shop site or tech stack for focused discussion. Reddit and FB may have replaced forums in most cases for most people from 2010 to now, but as they’ve become more commercialized with more rules, maybe we can switch back
[+] [-] stronglikedan|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bukhmanizer|2 years ago|reply
Most of my FB feed is photos of my friends/ life updates. Most of my Instagram feed is dogs. You can curate almost any social media into what you want, Reddit isn’t extraordinary in that respect.
But there’s a smugness to a lot of redditors I really despise that I think the voting system rewards. As if having the statistically most broadly agreeable opinions makes one superior. Even in small to medium sized communities.
[+] [-] ThrowawayTestr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Moto7451|2 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
[+] [-] freediverx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pwg|2 years ago|reply
Free access to text only groups: http://www.eternal-september.org/
Pick a newsreader: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders and go take a look.
[+] [-] xtracto|2 years ago|reply
The one thing I also wish would be better is discoverability... Just the other day I logged in into an irc server (LiberaChat?) but just didn't know where to go from there.. I got into my country's room, but it was very quiet.
[+] [-] readyplayernull|2 years ago|reply
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
[+] [-] grep_name|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LinuxBender|2 years ago|reply
Technically yes. Become widely adopted, maybe if...
There are free Usenet providers for the text groups. People would have to agree on methods to ignore the spam bots, maybe a signed message header/footer that a UI recognizes. There are forums and chat systems that already leverage Usenet as the transport/storage but they all need some tender loving care.
In my opinion for that to be widely adopted people would need a low friction way to access Usenet and it would need to provide them a UI/UX they are familiar with. Perhaps Usenet would be entirely transparent to them. Perhaps it would be a simple nginx web front-end so that anyone could run a node and it would use Usenet on the backend for storage and transport, ideally the sites that implemented NNTPS (TLS). Just nginx+python, or nginx+golang or an nginx module and super-lightweight with secure safe defaults. There would need to be a group set up where all the front-end nodes ingest group keys, identities, etc... and maybe a git repo that bootstraps all of this.
Traditional methods like using a Usenet reader such as Thunderbird? Probably not. Probably very small technical circles. I think this would be akin to convincing people to switch from Discord back to IRCD or using Mumble/Murmur for voice.
[+] [-] VikingCoder|2 years ago|reply
I want a client that looks basically how reddit looks today. An aggregator.
And maybe that aggregator has a back-end that runs on a VM somewhere that I control, or I can pay someone to run an aggregator for me, or whatever.
But I want each subreddit to be federated. Run on its own server, with its own moderators.
I want to be able to make as many Reddit accounts as I want to (dozens, maybe not hundreds), and pick which ones I use on which subreddits. Some decentralized authorization / authentication scheme? Or maybe some centralized server? Or using OAuth or something? I don't really care.
I want to SUBSCRIBE to a list of Admins. If an Admin shadowbans a user, I don't see their posts. I find this incredibly useful. Other people will disagree with me about which users, which actions, should result in shadowbanning.
I think that about wraps it up. What am I missing?
[+] [-] opportune|2 years ago|reply
I don’t think Reddit realized how smart this strategy would end up becoming, because over time what happened is that existing Reddit users would just join the subreddit for some topic they were interested in (like a band) instead of seeking out forums for it on the web. Eventually enough people started doing that, that subreddits for a topic would absolutely dwarf any single traditional forum in activity. Because reddit is a single site they could also do a bunch of SEO optimizations due to having larger scale than independent forums. The result is a massive network effect and controllling the top-of-funnel for online discussions on the web.
Anyway, what fucked up Reddit was that after 2010 or so they started turning it into more of a consumption platform than a discussion platform, plus various issues with moderation (the emergence of powermods who are all secretly monetizing their subs to help advertisers, implementing platform-wide moderation policies), turning it more into a centralized service with less focus on discussion.
Honestly, combining the web with forums provides like 90% of what you want, it just doesn’t do aggregation, nor does it let you directly ban a mod (but you can always switch sites). But it does decentralize auth, moderation, servers, and allow more freedom in how a subreddit-equivalent gets run while also allowing moderators to directly monetize their sites rather than having to resort to secretive scheming. Maybe we simply need some kind of protocol or common API + FOSS client that lets you automatically grab and sort top posts from a list of forums that implement the protocol.
[+] [-] psyfi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wccrawford|2 years ago|reply
I think it'd basically mean there was an easy way to access usenet text groups via the browser, and thus also an easy way for the average Joe to access usenet.
Some have already mentioned spam and moderation, and I think this will be a huge factor. Without the ability to moderate, bad actors quickly ruin any potentially-popular social media outlet. Most comments are happy about the lack of moderation so far, but that's actually a problem IMO.
[+] [-] opportune|2 years ago|reply
Anyway, the forums of the aughts were discoverable through search and anecdotally used to be more highly ranked in search queries until they mysteriously started getting derailed by Google I think around 2016 or so. They solve the moderation and spam problem by have forum moderators just like Reddit - unlike Reddit these were usually real people from the forum + owners, and not powermods. Power mods I think do all kinds of shady stuff to monetize their control, with forums that’s less necessary as you can just put up banner ads, sponsored content, etc without running afoul to Reddit policies. And unlike with Reddit, there is no huge incumbency/landgrab advantage from controlling a common term like “politics” because you’re not running on a single site. I was surprised not to see it mentioned more here or on the current top Reddit post also discussing this, I guess most Reddit users are too young to have had exposure to them, but besides Digg it’s actually what Reddit replaced as it grew in the early 2010s.
[+] [-] silisili|2 years ago|reply
Anymore you have to verify each response, look into their history, etc. Which puts it back on par with Amazon reviews, really.
[+] [-] adamzochowski|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ekaros|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agiacalone|2 years ago|reply
Generally blocking public services (like Google Groups) is enough to block 90%+ spam
[+] [-] notacoward|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|2 years ago|reply
Unless someone moderates.
Then you have Reddit, ie the need to fund moderation.
Or a corner case where there are volunteers.
And besides users will want tags and private messages and the ability to follow personalities and avatars and such.
None of which addresses zero latency for the first child porn. Remember how common it was for ISP’s to block everything starting with “alt” ?
Yes it was fun while it lasted but it wasn’t AOL that killed it. It was ubiquitous bandwidth improvements worldwide.
[+] [-] TheIronMark|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] commandlinefan|2 years ago|reply
Well, reddit is free (for the individual user) - Usenet is not. ISP's don't even offer news accounts any more and even when they did, they were so useless you had to pay for an NNTP account anyway.
[+] [-] mnky9800n|2 years ago|reply
I stopped because I found that looking at reddit would negatively alter my perceptions of reality. Hacker news doesn't seem to do that. I also found that conversations on reddit were not very engaging but rather formulaic. It wasn't about having a discussion, just towing a party line (whatever the party for the particular subreddit might be).
[+] [-] kagevf|2 years ago|reply
... what about here?
[+] [-] agiacalone|2 years ago|reply
Tilde operates one, as does SDF, the two *nix communities that I belong to.
https://tilde.wiki/wiki/NNTP
(SDF is member only access)
[+] [-] JohnFen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] more_corn|2 years ago|reply
Duh. Have you learned nothing of the tech cycle?
[+] [-] contingencies|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gordonjcp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr_tristan|2 years ago|reply
i.e., I've seen a lot of comments like this that makes me think this is going to be a real problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/comment/...
Personally, this is what bothers me the most; subreddits that are strictly moderated are usually useful, and ones that aren't are just not worth regular time.
This is also why I'm not really sure about usenet or any other replacement, because moderation is still the hard problem to get right.
[+] [-] kalupa|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jandrese|2 years ago|reply
If they also stop offering old.reddit.com I'm convinced the place will be a ghost town like Tumblr in a matter of weeks.
[+] [-] Ekaros|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgv|2 years ago|reply
That, and the the whole question of who's going to pay for a large amount of usenet traffic. Think of all those images traveling uuencoded and being stored at every hub...
[+] [-] notacoward|2 years ago|reply
Yes, the text-only bias of Usenet (really NNTP) is a bit of a problem, but otherwise it's a pretty good starting point. Better IMO than ActivityPub, which is insane wrt consistency - e.g. everyone viewing a post from different servers is likely to see a different set of responses - and is actively cache-hostile. Fix the text bias, or add a side protocol for images like IRC did, and it would be pretty close to what you'd want for a decentralized Reddit (or HN) replacement.
[+] [-] kiwidrew|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 7373737373|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dark-star|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaronax|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afavour|2 years ago|reply
The idea that a serious number of users would rather move to Usenet than use Reddit's official offerings feels like very optimistic thinking to me.
[+] [-] tomjen3|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcarmo|2 years ago|reply
NNTP was a massive quasi-distributed forum (I wasn’t the newsmaster at the ISPs I worked at, but frequently dealt with the servers and setups) and a pretty big overhead resource and management-wise, but pretty interesting to deal with until it was overwhelmed by binaries groups and all sorts of weirdness.
I do miss the quirky sense of humor and the community - somewhat like Mastodon, for those who are leaving Twitter - but I don’t miss the drama, the flooding and the flame wars.
[+] [-] ChrisArchitect|2 years ago|reply
Log in -> set preferences -> surf reddits with www. urls like normal.